The safety of students and educators in our schools remains the highest priority and biggest concern of today’s school officials. This message has been driven home repeatedly by tragedies such as the Columbine school massacre in the 90s and the host of other copycat tragedies that have followed, including the senseless murder of Amish children in October 2006. In the close-knit Amish community, the word security was probably never in anyone’s vocabulary.

If you teach or support students with ADD/ADHD, then at some point you’ll be helping them and their parents with the various homework problems they face. Our first piece of work is to determine where the student is breaking down. To ask "what's the kid's deal"? And to encourage parents to direct support to those points of performance.

From time to time I will hear that an individual "is being tested for ADHD" as though there were some objective diagnostic tool which allows certain identification of the underlying condition, in the sense that one may be "tested" for Lyme's disease.

In fact, there is no "test" for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Rather, ADHD is a clinical diagnosis made on the basis of

After discussion of the how's and why's of positive reinforcement, the question inevitably comes up. A parent will lower her chin to her chest, widen her eyes, and get a really serious look on her face. "But shouldn't you just do some things because you're supposed to? How long do I have to reward him for doing things that other kids his age are just doing? What about intrinsic motivation?"